The Electra Forums

Ugh... I think I'll have to just leave the binding alone... someone flooded so much super-glue in there, it'll just crack and break if I try to clamp it...
On the plus side, the rest of the finish is immaculate. Not a scratch or ding anywhere except right around the neck joint. I'm getting ready to take things apart as we speak, and of course take some pictures!

I think there is a product called a de-bonder for removing crazy glue. I dont know what it would do to a finish but I recall Crusty from the Uncle Matt forum saying he used it.

I heartily encourage the choice to leave it alone. As fun as it can be to restore, lots of times it's jsut as well to leave it exactly as it is, maintain it and that's it.

How do I post pics without offsite hosting?
I've gotten the neck joint and binding repaired. I flooded the cracks with super-glue (I was neat, unlike the previous 'repair') and clamped it up. You can hardly tell that some sort of expanding glue, like Gorilla glue was used initially. The neck pickup was glued in to it's hole, once freed it needed the coil glued back on to the magnet, a little contact cleaner in the switch, and the electronics seem good as new (although noisy as hell). I noticed when I Was testing things with the neck pickup out that if I turned the pickup upside down, and selected both pickups, the output was humbucking - dead quiet. Can I successfully take the pickup apart and flip the magnet over internally to get humbucking with both pickups selected? Or do I have to re-wire the coil too, so the end is the beginning and vice versa?
The only issue I am having now is the bridge is WWAAYY to high... it's non-origonal.. anyone have a good (better than the pics posted on this site under 2221) picture of the bridge on one of these? Also, the non-catalog pic of the 2221 on the site seems to have the bridge in the wrong place??

-m

I went ahead and made a HArmony style bar bridge out of some brass angle bits I had (I of course, have pics) just so I could string 'er up and give a listen. It sounds great although the pickups are pretty darn noisy, and kinda microphonic. The fake bigsby is a blast! And supprisingly, the intonation is pretty darn good. I can play Wipeout and not notice any out of tune notes. Even with 2 pieces of brass layered on each other, the preassure of 11s as warped the bar a little.. I'm going to go get some steel angle from the hobby shop and re-do it for the time being.. Any suggestions for a bridge? I guess I need a truss-rod cover too...

I use generic imported hardware for stuff like this, as it's usually a copy of some old gibson style, just like the hardware on the 2221 was.

http://search.stores.ebay.com/Guitarfet ... 82QQsofpZ0

This is one dealer of many, but he's someone I know from a refinishing forum, he's a good guy and sells quality stuff. If you go through the usual sources (Stew-Mac etc) you'll see much the same kind of thing, though prices vary.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Deluxe-Rosewood-Arc ... dZViewItem

I've bought TONs of stuff from guitar-fetish. Great store!
The original wooden bit from the bridge (which appears to have some old yellow paper under it) seems to be fastened to the top with a small nail through each side. Is this a factory fastening or some more 'repair' work? Anyway, it appears to be stock. The bridge posts also seem to be original judging by the ammount of corrosion holding the threads in place. The seller had purchased a good quality fully adjustable 'made in west germany' vintage archtop roller-type bridge. Only - it's WAY to tall. The pole spacing is the same as a tune-o-matic, so I popped one from the parts bin on just to check things out. Still to tall! Even with some major adjustments to the neck angle, it's just not playable. I need some sort of bridge that's saddles are the same height as the top of the mounting posts. That's how high my bar bridge is, and with the posts screwed all the way down is just about perfect with a set of 11s..

PICS! Sorry for the poor quality / lighting on these; my camera sucks!

And a few before pics from the ebay listing:

Well okay, I'm gonna suggest something other than the bridge, because a bridge like that is pretty much what it originally had. If the action is too high, somethign else is wrong, either the truss rod or the neck pocket.

First, how's the neck curve? If you sight along it, you should jsut barely see the fretboard curve upwards from straight- just a hint of 'relief'.

Drying of the neck as it ages requires periodic truss rod adjsutment, and a lot of old guitars never got this. Mercifully, even cheap Japanese guitars have pretty solid necks, unlike the later Korean ones which sometimes warped with age.

SO that's the first step, adjsuting the truss rod- probably with a hex wrench. I always like to manually bend the neck in the opposite direction the strings pull when I adjust the it, because that makes the truss rod loose and easy to adjust, and then you can ease the bend of the neck back on to it. THe normal advice is don't go more than 1/4 turn at a time, but that assumes it's been adjusted and maintained sometime int he past, and many never were. Once it's close and you want it just a little straighter, or you're adjsuting up to heave gauge strings, then yes, jsut 1/4 turn per day is safe. If it's flapping in the breeze, go ahead and torque it up to where it seems to need to be.

If adjusting the truss rod doesn't fix the too-high action (and it really might) then the next step is to shim the neck. Basically you loosen the strings and loosen the neck screws and put a strip of cardboard the size of a 1/4" strip of matchbook cover. You may very well find there's already a strip like that in there, a lot of them were shimmed at the factory to make the action right.

Over time the neck pocket can warp in the body, and shimming is the answer. You may also see some distortion of the top around the neck pocket. I wouldn't worry about loss of resonance with the shim, honestly these things resonate like crazy and the thin necks make them pretty lively anyhow. A little dampening might not be a bad thing, not that I'm suggesting you stuff it with rags (although some people cover the F-holes with clear tape for high volumes)

A very little shim will make a big difference in neck angle- you should find a shim at the bottom, at the heel end of the neck, will lower the action until it's within range.

This is important: plan to remove the neck at least six times to get it right. Each time will mean re-tuning and checking action, yes, but that's OK. (Hmm.... if you want to get fancy, sometimes I've used the tremolo bridge to loosen the strings while I removed the neck each time- I don't recall which guitar and trem- somehow I blocked it. On a strat bridge you'd just stick a pencil under the bridge, maybe you can figure something similar.)

But in three to six tries you'll get it to where the action can be adjsuted perfectly with the bridge in its normal range. At that point the whole guitar will ease a little sigh of relief as its potential as a musical insrument returns.

Well...
I've already checked the relief and set the truss rod. I check relief by fretting at the 1st and 20th frets, using the string as a straight-edge. I then look for about half the thickness of the E string above the 10th and 12th frets.
Everything OK there.

The neck pocket has 2 shims in it (added by me) at the extreme front of the pocket. They happen to be made fron matchbook covers!

The neck pocket WAS deformed a bit, and when I went to go put things back together, the neck didn't fit, mostly because of some hArd rubbery glue-gunk at the front of the neck pocket, from the previous 'repair'. The neck was on TIGHT when I got it, mabye the neck pocket was deformed from the pressure of the neck screws cranking the neck down on the glue-glob? There is a small crack in the neck-block, near where the glue glob was. It extends about 1CM each way, and is about 1-2mm wide. It goes through the exact center of the treble side screw hole furthest from the headstock. I flooded it with gap-filling CA and used a bit of clamp to close it up a bit and stabalize things. After everyhting dried, I cleaned the gunk out, and used a tiny flat diamond file to square and smooth everything up without really removing any wood. As you can see in the pics, I didn't even go through the paint.

With the bridge I have on there currently, the action is perfect. The neck angle appears correct for the current bridge height, because the action is consistent all the way up the neck. A to shallow of a neck angle would mean super high action at the upper frets. A to steep of a neck angle would result in the string actually being closer to the board at the upper frets!

I think there is a bit more room for some shims in the neck pocket; I may be able to replace the cardboard with a super-thin purpleheart wedge type shim to increase the neck angle a little more. That MIGHT give me a proper neck angle for a tune-o-matic type bridge. The roller bridge it came with has a bit taller profile than a tune-o-matic, although the rollers make the actual string height lower than the bridge height.. Maybe I'll try more shims and the adjustable bridges soon.. I'm having fun playing it as-is right now! I think i'll also either pot the pickups, or replace them (of course, saving them!) with some nice humbucker sized p-90s from Guitarfetish (those GFS pickups ROCK!)

Opinion?

I second the recommendation on GFS pickups. Sounds like you have it well in hand!

Well.... Now I can't find / remember where the heck I put the roller bridge that came with the thing! Not a whole lotta places it could be....
I think this question ginkot over looked, so I'll ask again:

on the main Electra page, there is a catalog pic of the 2221, and several pics of someone's personal 2221. In the personal pics, the bridge appears to be WAY WAY to far towards the bride. Like 4 or 5 inches! What's up with that?I would think that even set up for slide, the intonation would be WAY off. Even with a shorter replacement neck, it CAN'T be even close to correct. Right?

Right. And since the bridge isn't fixed, it can slide around any old where.

All that means is it got knocked out of whack, and nobody has played it since. Might even be a wallhanger. Some of the old images from the site are from ebay auctions, maybe the bridge fell off and an ignorant seller stuck it on the wrong place.

OK, so the bridge is supposed to be floating on these models? The pictures aren't close enough to where I can see if there are holes where the bridge should be located.. The bridge on mine has been fixed to the top with what appear to be 2 small nails! As I said before, it looks like there is a little bit of old yellow paper under there too..